Lisa Yuskavage Prints
David Zwirner is pleased to present a selection of prints by Lisa Yuskavage. These works incorporate not only traditional but also vanguard print techniques and were made in collaboration with renowned fine art print publisher Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). Two major solo exhibitions of Yuskavage’s paintings are also currently on view at the gallery in New York: Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018 at 533 West 19th Street and New Paintings at 34 East 69th Street.
Yuskavage approaches printmaking with the same exacting interest in technique, material, and art history that guides her painting. She has described thinking of her oeuvre as a kind of “generational” family; most of her prints have a direct relationship to her paintings’ themes and compositions and also appear in important museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Perez Art Museum, Miami and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Yuskavage has been making prints since her first lithography class in her sophomore year of college. Her deep knowledge and interest in the technical processes has guided her five-year collaboration with master printers Bill Goldston and Brian Berry at ULAE and is exemplified by the wide range of complex techniques and unique prints on view here—from twelve-color lithographs, drypoint, chine-collé, monotypes, and monoprints to an inventive new process in which pastel is overlaid on inkjet prints. This Viewing Room demonstrates Yuskavage’s engagement with radical advancements in modern printmaking (the work of Edgar Degas and Jasper Johns are important precedents for her), as well as her desire "not to accept any givens" in her studio. She embraces printmaking as “the perfect medium” for experimenting with materials and researching an image—a process-driven practice that considers, questions, and redefines every component of the print, from the toning of the paper ground to breakthrough achievements such as her characteristic and innovative “atmospheric color.”